Tom Sachs pays tribute to a defining icon of street culture—the boom box—by transforming our glass entryway, the Rubin Pavilion, into a living sound system that hovers between art and science, the functional and the mythological.

Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999–2016 features eighteen works that highlight the artist’s ability to inventively transform ordinary, everyday materials into art. With wit and ingenuity, he creates boom box sculptures that play music and activate the space, turning it into an immersive sound environment. The work is programmed with playlists that go on sequentially throughout our public hours.

The installation includes Toyan’s (2002), a group of speakers eight feet tall by twelve feet across inspired by Jamaican sound systems, and Presidential Vampire Booth (2002), complete with a stocked bar and Presidential seal. Sachs’s work is crafted from a wide range of materials such as plywood, foamcore, batteries, duct tape, wires, hot glue, and solder.

Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999–2016 is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.
An earlier version of this exhibition, entitled Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective 1999–2015, opened in January 2015 at The Contemporary Austin.

2016-05-11

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., is mounting the first exhibition to fully explore the Romantic era as a formative period in costume history from Mar. 5, 2016 – Jul. 10, 2016. “Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion & Its Legacy,” presents historic garments alongside literary works, paintings, prints, and decorative arts to illustrate how European fashion from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras influenced new styles created in the Romantic era between 1810 and 1860. The exhibition explores how Romantic era principles of historicism, imagination and emotion, religion and the natural world—rejections of Neoclassical order and rationality—impacted not only costume but fine and decorative art, architecture, interior design, literature and music, and reveal the Romantic roots of recent Goth and Steampunk fashions. Lynne Z. Bassett, Costume and Textile Historian and museum consultant, is organizing the exhibition.

The first half of the 19th century—the Romantic era—is characterized by a societal shift away from the order and reason of the Enlightenment period, and corresponding embrace of imagination and emotion, originality and vision, and individuality and subjectivity as guiding principles. Romanticism idealized nostalgia for the bygone quiet rural life in a time of cultural stress, offering an escape from the social and economic uncertainty of the Industrial Revolution. These values gave rise in America to the Hudson River School of landscape painters, Transcendentalist philosophers including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and a fascination with revisiting historic costume designs that has endured to influence fashion in the present day.

“Gothic to Goth” explores how 500 years of European fashions were selectively integrated into creative new styles by showcasing women’s and children’s clothing and accessories from 1810−1860, alongside literary works, paintings, furniture and decorative arts of the period. Costume pieces, drawn largely from the Wadsworth Atheneum’s own collection, were carefully chosen to delve deeply into the inspirations of the little understood Romantic era of fashion. A cotton muslin dress from c. 1820, one of the earliest works in the exhibition, is an early example of historical revival clothing, with sleeves inspired by a Renaissance “slashed” style. A cotton dress from the 1830s incorporates the large, puffed sleeves and wide collar of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the decorative tab edging of the collar recalls clothing in the 13th and 14th centuries and the crenellations of Gothic revival buildings. In another mix of styles, a dress from c. 1840 reveals an overall silhouette akin to a Gothic arch and a bodice inspired by 16th-century gowns. A veneration of nature and spirituality is also embodied in the costume, as well as in the furniture and decorative arts featured in “Gothic to Goth,” along with the Romantic interest in historical revival. Garments including wedding gowns, a nursing dress, children’s clothing and accessories commemorating friendship reflect the sentimentalization of love, marriage and motherhood in popular Romantic era art and literature.

A look at recent Goth and Steampunk fashions concludes the exhibition, revealing their roots in the rich imagination and aesthetic of Romanticism, and featuring designs by Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier, Nightwing Whitehead and House of Coniglio. The entire exhibition showcases approximately 40 fully-dressed mannequins, in addition to accessories, furniture, paintings and decorative arts objects.

2016-05-04

In 1935, Frank Hartley Anderson founded the Southern Printmakers Society, the only major graphic arts society in the South at the time. For 10 years, the group circulated dozens of print exhibitions throughout the South, a region with few venues for viewing art, but its work was cut short by World War II. In celebration of the society, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia will present the exhibition “Frank Hartley Anderson: Forging the Southern Printmakers Society” from March 26 to June 19, 2016.

Organized by guest curator Lynn Barstis Williams Katz, librarian emeritus, Auburn University, and a noted scholar on southern prints, the exhibition will display works made by a wide variety of artists who were members of the society. In 1994, one of Anderson’s daughters placed 73 prints in different media created by the society on longterm loan at the museum, and in 2008 she made the gift official.

Frank Hartley Anderson and his wife, the former Martha Fort, had a long-lasting impact on the South’s artistic community. By 1930, the two artists had begun collecting and exhibiting art in their home in Birmingham, Alabama. In founding the Southern Printmakers Society, the Andersons let printmakers share ideas and resources, creating touring exhibitions and giving out monetary prizes.

Instead of focusing only on printmakers working in the South, Anderson advertised in Art Digest, a national periodical, to diversify the society’s membership. By 1936, the society had organized its first exhibition, displaying more than 200 prints at the Birmingham Public Library. From there, the group went on to organize dozens of other exhibitions and promote artists throughout the United States.

The exhibition reveals a range of print media, styles and subjects within traditional, realistic composition, from Lynd Ward’s wood engraving “Seedling,” of a man cradling a tender young plant, to Hungarian-Canadian Nicholas Hornyansky’s colorful aquatint of a busy harborside market. It includes a number of works by women, who were active in the printmaking world, such as Alice Standish Buell, Frances Gearhart, Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer, Ella Fillmore Lillie, Elizabeth Norton and Gladys M. Wilkins.

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